Modern computer users have access to many sources of information that can be collected and correlated together. Any suitable source may be used to acquire information that may be of interest to a user. In a business context, the information source will often include data from one or more business applications and, in some cases, suites of business applications. These applications are used to provide visibility and control over various aspects of the business. Such business applications (or, as they are sometimes called, “enterprise applications”) can include, without limitation, customer relations management (CRM) applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, supply chain management applications, and other applications dealing with various finance, accounting, manufacturing, and/or distribution functions, to name but a few examples. Exemplary enterprise application suites include, without limitation, Oracle Fusion, Oracle eBusiness Suite, and JD Edwards Enterprise One, all of which are available from Oracle Corporation of Redwood Shores, Calif.
In recent years, business intelligence (BI) software has become increasingly important to large business enterprises and other organizations to review and access business information maintained by the organization. Business intelligence provides current and historical views of business operations by analyzing internal, structured data and business processes of the organization. It is often used to create future models and predictions in order to support better business decision making. As such, business intelligence tools can lead to decreased costs and increased efficiency, productivity and profit margins for many companies.
Business intelligence is usually implemented as enterprise tools that are used to collect and analyze data and to transform the raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making. As such, a typical business intelligence server relies on data that may reside in a variety of places, including but not limited to relational databases, online analytical processing (OLAP) tools, repositories and content management systems, application servers, as well as a number of other sources.
In a typical business intelligence (BI) server, data is collected from all (or some) of these data sources and placed into a (virtual or physical) data warehouse or data mart, where it can then be modeled and analyzed before being presented to the user. For example, one approach is to implement a physical layer within the business intelligence server, where data is modeled as a consolidated table that mirrors objects in the data source layer. An application developer can assemble these compound objects by hand using a subset of the entities relevant to the domain; the synthesized objects can subsequently be imported into the business intelligence server's metadata and decomposed into dimensions and facts.
Various interfaces have been employed to view the multidimensional data that exist in business application systems such as BI systems, data marts, data warehouses, and enterprise applications, and some of such interfaces include multidimensional sunburst graphical interface widgets, however legacy sunburst widgets fail in at least the following aspects:                Legacy sunbursts are not optimized for use on small, touch-sensitive devices (e.g., tablet screens).        Sunbursts need to be interactive so as to facilitate human-machine interaction (e.g., by touch).        Some dimensions might comprise many hundreds (or thousands, or more) discrete values, making legacy sunbursts difficult to control and difficult to read.        Legacy sunbursts do not make it easy to directly add, remove, reorder, or filter the display without changing context or dealing with some other representation of the data structure.        Legacy sunbursts are shown in their entirety on the screen without conveniences to temporarily enlarge a given section of interest        Legacy sunbursts do not have a facility to label very small wedges.        Legacy sunbursts are used only to visualize a certain view of data, not as an input mechanism to easily control and change other data displays.        
What is needed is a technique or techniques for implementing an interactive, touch-friendly sunburst interface element that operates in tandem with adjacent tabular interface elements and serves not only as a way to visualize a fixed view of data but to easily change views and access related information for each view.